Paris Fashion Exhibitions Fall 2026 to Catch During Fashion Week
August 21, 2026
From Irving Penn to Azzedine Alaïa, Paris Presents Some of Its Best Exhibitions This Fall
Paris is giving us more than Spring/Summer 2027 this Fashion Week. On September 30, while the shows are already underway, Irving Penn's photographs of Dior, Balenciaga, and Yves Saint Laurent come out at the MEP. The same day, 40 landmark fashion looks take over the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. Two days later, Rafael Pavarotti gets more than 200 photographs of his own. Paris Fashion Exhibitions Fall 2026 could hardly have timed it better.
Fashion Week runs from September 28 through October 6. Between shows, dinners, and whatever happens afterwards, these are the Exhibitions worth making room for.
Irving Penn Gets PENN & FASHION Started
📍 Maison Européenne de la Photographie
📅 September 30, 2026 to January 17, 2027
🌐 MEP Paris
Start with PENN & FASHION. The Exhibition opens on September 30 and follows Irving Penn through six decades of fashion, beginning with the Paris couture photographs that made him inseparable from the subject.
First come Dior and Balenciaga in the 1950s, worn by Lisa Fonssagrives and Jean Patchett. Then Ungaro and Courrèges enter the frame alongside Marisa Berenson and Lauren Hutton. Finally, Yves Saint Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld take us into the 1980s. Penn photographed fashion until 2008. The MEP puts that entire relationship back together.
Forty Looks Take Over MAD
📍 Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Rue de Rivoli
📅 September 30, 2026 to April 4, 2027
🌐 MAD Paris
Across town, another Fashion Week opening starts the same day. LOOK! 40 Ans de Mode au Musée celebrates 40 years of the museum's fashion collection with 40 looks.
Here, you follow a creation through its two lives. First, the sketch. Then the atelier, runway and fashion photograph. Afterwards comes the part we rarely see: the museum acquires it, conserves it, restores it and eventually puts it back under the lights. Madeleine Vionnet is among the names already confirmed. Forty years of fashion, edited down to 40 pieces.
Rafael Pavarotti Puts Rihanna on the Wall
📍 Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Rue de Rivoli
📅 October 2, 2026 to May 2, 2027
🌐 MAD Paris
Two days later, stay at the MAD. Brazilian photographer Rafael Pavarotti gets his first French museum Exhibition with more than 200 prints. You already know the faces. Rihanna. Beyoncé. Harry Styles. The magazine covers and campaigns for major Maisons. The Museum places Pavarotti's saturated, highly constructed images alongside photographs from its own collection, which should make this considerably more interesting than a greatest-hits wall of celebrity portraits.
Palais Galliera Opens a New Wardrobe
📍 Palais Galliera, Avenue Pierre 1er de Serbie
📅 September 26, 2026 to February 14, 2027
🌐 Palais Galliera
Two days before Fashion Week begins, Palais Galliera opens Un Vestiaire à Soi. Féminités Dissidentes au 19e Siècle.
The subject starts with something deceptively simple: women wearing men's clothes. In the 19th century, that meant appropriating trousers, jackets and other codes from a wardrobe society had very clearly assigned elsewhere. Galliera traces the women who did it anyway and what those clothes said about gender, freedom and identity long before fashion decided to call any of it unisex.
And while you're there, go downstairs. Tisser, Broder, Sublimer stays on view through October 18, with more than 350 pieces devoted to the hands behind fashion: embroidery, lace, weaving, dyeing, artificial flowers and the artisans who turn decoration into couture. Lesage, Lemarié and Desrues sit alongside Dior, Gucci, Paul Poiret and contemporary creators.
Azzedine Alaïa Goes Back to Africa
📍 Fondation Azzedine Alaïa, 18 Rue de la Verrerie
📅 Through January 4, 2027
🌐 Fondation Azzedine Alaïa
Azzedine Alaïa et l'Afrique looks at a relationship Alaïa carried with him throughout his career. He left Tunisia young, yet African forms, objects, and memories continued through his work. The moucharabiehs he remembered from childhood are part of that story.
Curator Olivier Saillard goes looking for those connections inside the designer's work rather than simply placing African objects beside Alaïa dresses and calling it influence. And during Fashion Week, there is probably no better moment to see Alaïa away from the runway and back inside the Rue de la Verrerie building where he lived and worked.
Gianni Versace Retrospective
📍 Musée Maillol, Paris 7e
📅 Through October 31, 2026
🌐 Gianni Versace Retrospective
Gianni Versace understood the celebrity runway before fashion turned it into an industry. Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington, Linda Evangelista and Cindy Crawford walked together. Gold chainmail became eveningwear. Baroque prints met safety pins, leather and Medusa heads. By the 1990s, a Versace show could generate as much attention as the people sitting in its front row.
The Gianni Versace Retrospective at Musée Maillol goes back through that world with original pieces spanning the designer's career from 1989 to 1997. More than 200 creations bring together the silhouettes, prints, accessories and runway moments that made Versace instantly recognizable.
Martine Bedin: 1980–2023–2025
📅 Through October 14, 2026
📍 Saint Laurent Montaigne, Paris
🌐 YSL
Saint Laurent turns its Avenue Montaigne space to Martine Bedin, the French designer and founding member of the Memphis group. 1980–2023–2025 brings together furniture and objects spanning more than four decades of her work, from her early Memphis years to recent creations. Expect Bedin's playful geometry, unexpected forms and bold approach to everyday objects inside Saint Laurent Montaigne.
On Aura Tout Vu Checks Into the Sofitel
📍 Sofitel Paris Le Faubourg, Paris 8e
📅 Through October 6, 2026
On Aura Tout Vu has never had much interest in quiet couture. For more than two decades, Livia Stoianova and Yassen Samouilov have covered bodies in crystals, feathers, sculpted forms and enough fantasy to attract Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Madonna and Katy Perry.
Icons brings some of those creations out of the couture archive and into Sofitel Paris Le Faubourg. The Exhibition retraces the Maison's extravagant vocabulary through emblematic pieces, turning the hotel near Place de la Concorde into an unexpected couture stop.
La Galerie Dior
📍 11 Rue François Ier, Paris 8e
📅 Permanent
La Galerie Dior takes you inside the history of the Maison at the address where Christian Dior established his couture house in 1946. Original sketches, photographs, accessories and haute couture trace the collections and creative directors that followed, while the spectacular color-gradient wall of miniature Dior pieces has become almost as recognizable as the clothes themselves.
The scenography changes regularly, so the experience never stays completely static. For September and October, the Gallery remains open and timed visits are available.
Fondation Cartier at the Palais-Royal
📍 Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Place du Palais-Royal
📅 Through October 26, 2026
🌐 Fondation Cartier
For fall 2026, Raymond Hains: L'œuvre en chantier. Du Grand Louvre aux 3 Cartier brings the artist's photographs of the Grand Louvre construction back to the very neighborhood where he took them between 1981 and 1991.
Start above ground on Place du Palais-Royal, where Hains turns pipes, stone, scaffolding and construction barriers into what he called “sidewalk sculptures.” Then head underground to the Art Nouveau Galerie Valois inside the Palais-Royal–Musée du Louvre station. That second chapter closes October 4
Paul Kodjo: Photoromance
📍 Les Rencontres d'Arles, Espace Croisière through October 4
📍 Palais de Tokyo, Paris from October 21, 2026 to February 14, 2027
🌐 Palais de Tokyo
Photoromance revisits the work of Paul Kodjo, one of the major figures of post-independence Ivorian photography, and the first photographer in Côte d'Ivoire to turn the photoroman into his own visual language. After spending part of the 1960s in Paris, Kodjo returned to Abidjan in 1970 and founded MAMEDIS, an avant-garde agency working across photography, cinema and publishing.
His romantic serials began appearing in Ivoire Dimanche in 1971. Love affairs and dramatic plot twists unfold against another story: Abidjan during the economic and cultural boom of the 1970s. Kodjo photographed its nightlife, fashion and new urban rituals with the eye of a filmmaker. Photoromance brings those images together with a wider body of work, much of it shown publicly for the first time.
Musée Picasso Saves Kurt Schwitters
📍 Musée National Picasso-Paris, Hôtel Salé, Marais
📅 From October 6, 2026
🌐 Musée Picasso Paris
Kurt Schwitters: Le chaos-monde, 1918–1948 brings together more than 300 paintings, collages, sculptures, drawings, photographs, books and archival pieces. Schwitters turned discarded tickets, scraps of paper, newspaper fragments and everyday debris into his Merz universe. The Paris retrospective follows that restless experimentation across Dada, abstraction and Constructivism, marking his first major presentation in France in more than three decades
Fondation Pernod Ricard Goes Over the Top
📍 Fondation Pernod Ricard, 1 Cours Paul Ricard, Paris 8e
📅 September 8 to October 31, 2026
Three artists, three very different ways of playing with what we reveal and what we keep hidden. Over the Top, Undercover brings Jonathan Martin, R. Moreno and Clémence de La Tour du Pin together for the second edition of Fondation Pernod Ricard's Nouveau Programme, dedicated to artists at a pivotal point in their careers.
The title sets the game. Jonathan Martin moves between painting and installation. R. Moreno works through sculpture and the body, while Clémence de La Tour du Pin turns materials, interiors and objects into environments that never quite behave as expected. Rather than forcing the three into one theme, the Exhibition lets their worlds collide.
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